Take One With You

Churchill's exhortation in World War II was to take the enemy with you if you knew you were going to die.

Mark Steyn was spiked by the Telegraph, but you can read his important column here.

His point (and therefore his grave sin), as Wretchard at the Belmont Club notes, is that We Are at War, and if we stop the war for every hostage or every blackmail, we have lost.

That inability to think of ourselves as being truly at war underlay the rejection of Mark Steyn's column. He had only stated the obvious.

. . . consider Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq on April 14th. In the moment before his death, he yanked off his hood and cried defiantly, "I will show you how an Italian dies!" He ruined the movie for his killers. As a snuff video and recruitment tool, it was all but useless, so much so that the Arabic TV stations declined to show it. . . . As Churchill recommended in a less timorous Britain: You can always take one with you. If Mr Blair and other government officials were to make that plain, it would be, to use Mr Bigley's word, "enough". A war cannot be subordinate to the fate of any individual caught up in it.

Steyn scolds not only the Blair government for its handling of the Kenneth Bigley abduction (until his recent slaughter through beheading), but also the British people -- and all who think that we can just "give peace a chance" and reason with people who won't even listen to Cat Stevens [Hey, his name is Yusuf Islam, and the "listen" pun wasn't funny -- Ed. Shame, I thought so.]

In reality, gaining the respect of fellow Muslims was always going to be a much weaker motivating factor for Bigley's kidnappers than their own hatred of the West.

November 2 will say a great deal about how Americans view the present -- Are we at War, or are terrorists simply a nuisance?